ATI today announced that its flagship RADEON 9700 Pro graphics card is now available as a build-to-order option on Apple's recently announed revamped Power Macs. Customers purchasing a new Power Mac through the Apple online store can select to upgrade from a RADEON 9000 card to a RADEON 9700 PRO card for an additional $300.

Here's more from the official press release:

The RADEON 9700 PRO, the fastest and most feature-rich consumer graphics technology in the world, enables users to create and play advanced
real-time cinematic-quality visual effects on their Power Mac systems.

"ATI's RADEON 9700 PRO is a great option for built to order Power Mac G4s, underscoring the importance of graphics performance and quality as a key feature for their professional users," says Rick Bergman, Senior Vice President of Marketing, ATI Technologies Inc. "It also delivers twice the performance of any competing product on the market and enables gamers to crank up the quality-enhancing features while maintaining frame-rates that they can brag about."

"These are the most powerful and affordable Power Macs we have ever
shipped," said Greg Joswiak, Apple's vice president of Worldwide Product
Marketing. "We're excited by the blazing performance, leading-edge
features, and movie-quality cinematic effects the RADEON 9700 PRO delivers to our creative professional customers."

The RADEON 9700 PRO delivers:

Eight parallel rendering pipelines provide the brute force to process
over 2.5 billion pixels per second;

Four parallel geometry engines to process greater than 300 million
transformed and lit polygons per second;

HYPER Z(tm) III memory bandwidth saving technologies to reduce overdraw by detecting and discarding hidden pixels and reduce memory bandwidth consumption by over 50 per cent;

High-performance 256-bit DDR memory interface, providing over 20 GB/second of graphics memory bandwidth;

SMARTSHADER(tm) 2.0 advanced pixel and vertex shader technologies; and

SMOOTHVISION(tm) 2.0 state-of-the-art, full-scene anti-aliasing enabling unprecedented performance at even the highest quality anti-aliasing modes.

ATI

Apple

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